


A Spark in a sea of grey

by DAZzle_10



Series: Trans Owen Farrell [4]
Category: Rugby RPF, Rugby Union RPF
Genre: Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Misgendering, Trans Male Character, Trans Owen Farrell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-25
Updated: 2019-04-25
Packaged: 2020-01-31 21:01:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18599335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DAZzle_10/pseuds/DAZzle_10
Summary: Owen tries to find a way for his parents to understand what it means for him to be trans, rather than just accept it on a surface level, while dealing with a complete lack of acceptance at school.





	A Spark in a sea of grey

**Author's Note:**

> This week hasn't been the best, I gotta be honest, so... Here I am with another one of these. A slightly more positive one, to be honest, even if it doesn't start that way. Because, y'know, positivity is key. And it's good to remind myself of how much *has* improved and how far I've come. So... yeah.
> 
> I definitely don't think this is entirely up to scratch - that's my disclaimer. I just wanted to get it out here, though, so here it is. 
> 
> (Admittedly, most of my versions of this conversation took place in a car. With less crying. Because I had places to be so I had to look fine. But the one or two that happened in my bedroom... Yeah, there were probably a lot of tears.)

“Owen?”

Owen doesn’t bother to reply. He doesn’t want to open his mouth – doesn’t trust his voice not to shake, and doesn’t want to raise it, but if he doesn’t give it enough volume, it will come out far too high, and he dreads that even more.

With a sigh, his dad settles on the mattress behind him; he squeezes his eyes a little more tightly shut, willing the tears not to start spilling over now that his dad is so close to him. He doesn’t want to cry in front of his dad. He’s not meant to. (Boys don’t cry.)

The hand that settles on his shoulder through his thick duvet is almost too much, and he burrows deeper into the bed clothes, pressing his face into the mattress so that any liquid that does escape will be soaked up by the sheet instead. He wants to curl into himself, but if he draws his knees any closer to his chest, he knows that everything will feel more _obvious_ , and the thought makes him sick.

“Talk to me, mate,” his dad murmurs. “What’s bothering you?”

Owen doesn’t want to talk. He doesn’t want to tell anyone about everything that happens at school, let alone his dad – possibly the person he’d _least_ like to know about all of this.

“Is it… rugby?” his dad presses hesitantly, because apparently, he can’t _fucking leave it_.

Unable to swallow around the sharp stabbing in his throat, let alone speak, Owen merely shakes his head. His hand tightens in the front of his shirt where it’s been gripping the fabric like his life depends on it, and he shoves his face as far into both his shoulder and the mattress as he can, right up against the wall as he wishes that the duvet was bigger – big enough to cover him several times over and hide him from the world, maybe.

“School…?”

_Well… Kind of._

Shrugging, Owen wonders if – hopes that – his dad will just leave it alone: give up and let Owen feel sorry for himself in peace. He doesn’t want to talk about it, can’t his dad understand that? His dad wouldn’t get it – he doesn’t get any of it, no matter how much he pretends to. Not that Owen isn’t grateful for that pretence; he really is, it’s just tiring to keep pretending that it’s _enough_ , that he can get by with his parents just _pretending_ that he’s not their daughter – and his sisters still with no idea about any of it.

“…Is it a gender thing?”

 _Yes._ Yes, it is, but he’s not about to admit it, so instead, he offers another shrug, and gets a rushed, explosive exhale behind him in response before his dad tugs the covers back.

“C’mon, sit up,” his dad tells him, tone not so much coaxing as simply no-nonsense: it’s a tone that Owen’s used to responding to, and definitely prefers to being coddled, so he humours his dad and pushes himself up, hunching over his knees to stare at his feet instead.

He feels cold without his duvet.

“School _and_ gender?” his dad prompts, and Owen’s used to ignoring the slight hesitation in his dad’s voice at the last word. “Tell me about it, yeah?”

That’s not happening.

“Don’t want to,” Owen mutters, hoarse as his vocal chords scratch with the remembered effort of not crying for most of the day.

“Well, it’s never going to get better if you don’t talk about it,” his dad huffs, nudging him gently.

“It’s not going to get better anyway.”

Owen was stupid for ever thinking it would. Why would anyone ever understand? Why would anyone ever accept the truth? They don’t _need_ to, and it’s much easier for them if they don’t, so of course they won’t.

“It might get better to deal with,” his dad reasons carefully. “Start talking.”

Setting his jaw, Owen keeps his eyes fixed on his feet, watching his toes shift and wriggle with his own discomfort as he tries to think of something else to get out of this, something to distract his dad: change the subject or send him away. Nothing comes.

“Just… People saying things,” he concedes, and even that confession feels like a horrible secret has just been revealed, like he’s just uncovered something he never wanted his dad to know.

“…What sort of things?” his dad asks after a small pause – whether because he thought there was more coming, or because he didn’t know what to say, Owen isn’t sure.

“Things like – Things like –” Owen stumbles and closes his eyes once more. “Saying I’m a girl no matter what because I’ve got… _that stuff_ , and I’m crazy, and I’m just doing it for attention, and – and –”

Now that he’s started talking, he feels like he can’t stop.

“And all the teachers make me go with the girls, and everyone calls me _Liv_ and – and _Olivia_ all the time because they know it upsets me, and they make jokes, and they ask me loads of questions…”

Hurriedly, he drags a sleeve across his eyes to keep any tears from falling in the wake of his admissions. It all probably sounds trivial to his dad, but it’s not. It’s really not. It hurts, makes him feel sick, dirty, _wrong_ , and he doesn’t know how to defend himself, how to make them see _him_. No one sees _him_ – even his friends don’t, or they wouldn’t give him weird looks every time they slip up and call him ‘she’ then take far too long to correct themselves (or just don’t even notice and keep doing it until Owen decides that it’s time for him to leave).

“What sort of questions?”

“Questions like… like… What do I have, you know, down there…” he waves a hand awkwardly to avoid saying anything more explicit. “And what toilets do I use, and who do I like, boys or girls, and why do I want to be a boy – I don’t _want_ to be, I just am.”

Not that his dad will understand that – has ever understood that.

Sniffing, he swipes his arm over his eyes again and ducks his head, scrunching the duvet between his fingers as he fights the urge to rub at his chest.

“You just… are,” his dad echoes. “Owen… I know it’s hard for you to see it, but these people are just… They see what they’ve always known you as, and they –”

“I _know_!” Owen snaps, a hint of a snarl entering his tone in his frustration. “I fucking know, alright? I’m not a – an idiot! It’s not like I just can’t understand why they’re doing it! It’s just – It hurts, and I… I want it to stop, that doesn’t mean I don’t…”

He turns away, blinking fiercely. His dad doesn’t say anything, doesn’t move or even make a sound, and Owen hopes, just for a second, that he’s gotten through, that his dad will _listen_ to him now instead of saying that _he_ doesn’t get it. Owen gets it. No one else does.

“I don’t think you do understand,” his dad tells him, shattering that hope instantly. “I’m sure it’s all very obvious to you, but to the rest of us, you look like a girl, you sound like a girl…”

Owen’s throat closes in, his dad’s words punching the air from his lungs in one sickening blow. It’s the last thing he needs to hear right now, the one thing that could make all of this worse: that, despite all of his efforts, all the hard work he’s put in, he still looks and sounds like the one thing he’s not. It hurts, so much more than he things he could ever express aloud, a deep, nauseating ache that permeates throughout his body, seeming to settle in all of the places he doesn’t want to think about, making them heavy and awkward and all too obvious.

“And it’s hard for us to see past that. We can _try_ , but it’s going to take time – your mum and me are still adjusting, mate, never mind your classmates. They’re young, and they’re just trying to make sense of it.”

 _I’m young too_ , Owen thinks, but doesn’t say it.

 _It wasn’t very obvious_ , he also doesn’t say. I’m _just trying to make sense of it._

“Can you just leave me alone?” he chokes out, even as his diaphragm quivers with building sobs, the words shaking audibly.

“Don’t start this on me, Owen,” his dad sighs. “I’m just telling you the truth.”

“No, you’re not,” Owen manages, voice thickening by the second, tightening as his fingers grip uselessly at his duvet. “You don’t even understand any of it. You’re not even _trying_. Just – Just leave me alone.”

When his dad doesn’t respond immediately, he thinks that his wish for solitude might be respected, if nothing else. Yet again, his weak hint of optimism is crushed ruthlessly.

“I don’t know what else you want me to do, Owen,” his dad speaks flatly. “I don’t think you realise how _hard_ it’s been for us to support you. You were our daughter, and now you want us to magically accept that you’re our son just because you’ve cut your hair and you say so? Explaining it to my teammates was –”

Owen yanks his covers completely from his dad’s hands and pulls them firmly over himself, shoving his head under the pillow and curling into a tight ball as his hands find his ears to clamp viciously over them. His dad doesn’t even care about how he’s struggling, about how much he’s hurting – it’s just about how it’s been hard for _them_ , and isn’t that such a fucking tragedy. Owen _gets_ that it’s been hard for them, but they don’t care, and they don’t even want to listen to him, don’t try to understand him or what he’s going through. No one does.

He’s very, horribly, alone.

When his dad tries to pull the duvet away, he grips it tighter still, gritting his teeth even as the first of the tears that have welled in his eyes start to spill over. His body shudders with the force of each hitching sob as he struggles for breath, and his hands loosen; as soon as the covers go, he grabs at the pillow, folding it around his head to keep that hidden, if nothing else. Crying makes him weak, however, and his dad pulls that away easily.

“We’re not done talking,” his dad announces. “You can’t just cover your ears and start crying whenever you hear something you don’t like, Owen. If that’s how you think the world works, you’re in for a very rude awakening.”

Owen knows that’s not how the world works, he really does. He knows that it’s never going to be nice, never going to be easy, that no one’s ever going to say what he wants to hear. _Ever_.

An entire lifetime of this seems like far too much.

“And now you’re ignoring me,” his dad announces. “God’s sake, Liv – Owen.”

Owen didn’t think he could cry any harder, didn’t think there was any way to increase the fire in his eyes, the stabbing in his chest. He was wrong.

Now, it’s like he’s suffocating, throat rasping with every desperate inhale as he twists away from his dad’s hands to press his face – and the rest of his body – into the gap between the mattress and the wall, like maybe that could swallow him up, could keep him safe and hidden, or at least stop his head from burning.

“Andy?” his mum’s voice isn’t muffled, so she must have opened the door without Owen noticing; he didn’t realise he was crying so loudly. “What did you do to upset her?”

 _Why is this all happening at once?_ It’s too much, a crushing force that bears down on Owen as his dad’s weight shifts back to the edge of the mattress, and he wishes he had something to cling to, something to anchor him in this flood of pain – or at least to comfort him as he’s swept away on a tide of aching _wrongness_.

“Him,” his dad corrects quietly.

“…Him, yes, I – Of course,” his mum sighs. “What did you do to upset… him?”

Owen hates that they’re talking about him like he’s not here, but he doesn’t want to look at either of them, let alone talk to them; he doesn’t even think he’d have the breath if he tried. All he wants is to block it all out, let it all fade away and pretend it doesn’t exist.

“We were talking about, you know…” his dad trails off meaningfully.

“Oh.”

The mattress shifts as his dad’s weight leaves it completely, and immediately, he reaches out for the covers, drawing them back over himself to hide from both of them. No one stops him, silence falling aside from his desperate, choking sobs, punctuated with breathless whimpers that he tries to suppress but can’t hold back.

No one understands him, and no one wants to. He’s all alone, stuck in an endless existence of _Liv_ and _she_ , trapped inside a body which is starting to twist, increasingly misshapen and malformed with each passing day.

In the end, Owen doesn’t know how long he cries for. By the time his breathing finally starts to calm, his head is pounding – a dull, ugly beating against his skull with every sound, every minute twitch – and his eyes are screaming, raw as if they’ve been raked with nails until they bled. He feels drained, strung-out, wretched, and somewhere else in the house, his sisters are giggling.

Their happiness stings. It’s not that he doesn’t want them to be happy, but… it reminds him of himself. How he used to be. And he really hates that.

He doesn’t feel much like getting up, doesn’t really want to move at all, even if his stomach feels empty, his throat is dry, and he knows he needs to drink if he wants to get rid of the crushing pain in his skull. Instead, he settles for lying on his back, staring blankly up at the ceiling, minorly relieved that at least now, he’s too emotionally exhausted to feel as shit as he did before, and that the throbbing of his brain makes it hard to think.

Eventually, the door pushes open, and he turns his head slowly to stare at the doorway, wincing at the beam of bright light that cuts his vision where it’s reflecting off his bedroom wall.

“Owen?” his dad peers around the door. “We saved you some dinner, mate. You want me to bring it through?”

For a moment, Owen hesitates. Part of him wants to pretend that his dad isn’t here, that he isn’t even aware of his dad’s existence – if nothing else, just so that his dad won’t say those things to him again. He _is_ hungry, though.

“Yes, please,” he croaks; the hoarseness of his voice deepens it a little, which is nice, even if it is painful as well.

His dad reappears within a minute, with a plate of dinner and a glass of water, both of which Owen takes gratefully, having wrapped his duvet around himself to keep himself warm and hidden while he sits up to eat.

For a few minutes, while he eats, his dad hovers, watching him from the doorway, and he forces himself to ignore the stare. Finally, however, his dad sits next to him, a deep frown creasing his brow as he waits for Owen to finish eating.

Owen drags it out for as long as he can bring himself to.

“I’ve been thinking,” his dad starts as soon as he sets the plate aside. “Maybe… We haven’t really talked _that_ much about how you feel, and it might help both of us if you, you know…”

The lump that forms in Owen’s throat at the suggestion is sharp and painful, and he tries to swallow it down alongside the spark of hope that has burst into life.

“You won’t understand,” he mutters, fixing his eyes on his lap. “No one does.”

“Maybe we, ah… haven’t tried hard enough,” his dad offers quietly.

It’s something that Owen could’ve told his parents ages ago – something he’s tried to tell them, in fact – but hearing his dad acknowledge it is good, he thinks. He doesn’t really want to talk about it, feels tired and drained and just wants to go to sleep, but he can’t pass up this opportunity.

He just has no idea what to say.

“I…”

Squeezing his eyes tightly shut to focus, he bites his lip and hesitates. He doesn’t know what he can say that he hasn’t said already.

“It’s just…”

Again, he gives up, frustration starting to build inside him. Here, he has the perfect opportunity to explain everything, but he can’t take it, can’t even think of how to start this.

“I’m a boy,” he manages finally, because really, that’s all there is to it at the simplest level, so maybe it will provide the best foundations. “I don’t know how to explain that; I just am. And when people call me things like – like…”

His lips twist with discomfort, and he has to turn his face away, shoulders hunching in. He doesn’t want to say it aloud.

“Like my old name and things,” he fills in cautiously when his dad doesn’t take the opportunity to dispute what he’s said already. “It just feels _wrong_ when they do that. It hurts. And it makes me feel sick. And it’s just… It’s not _right_. And – And I _know_ it’s not easy for everyone to – to just… But that doesn’t mean I can just stop it hurting. It’s just no one at school even tries, and you and Mum… You try to call me the right things, but I know you’re not really trying to understand. You’re only doing it because you think I’m going to kill myself or something stupid if you don’t.”

…Owen’s not sure that he meant to admit that he knows that. A quick glance at his dad tells him that it was probably the wrong thing to say, because his dad looks stricken, eyes wide with pain and worry. Sniffing quietly, he drags his arm over his eyes.

“No one really sees _me_ ,” he whispers. “No one understands. And it’s not just obvious and easy for me, or I wouldn’t have gone so long without realising. And it’s not easy. It’s – It’s not easy. It’s… tiring, and – and it hurts, and I don’t _like_ being different, and people calling me things and trying to make me feel bad… And I don’t like being the only one. But I can’t _stop_ it. It just is.”

It feels like yet again, now that he’s started talking, he can’t really stop – doesn’t _want_ to stop, this time. He needs to get it all out there, is scrambling at threads of topics to throw it all out into the open, to make his dad see the truth. He needs his dad to understand, and he doesn’t know what he’ll do if this doesn’t work, because he doesn’t have anything left to try.

“And I don’t like how my body’s changing,” his throat squeezes in a little, “And how my voice is too high, and how people just assume straight up that… And when I look in the mirror, all I see is – is – It’s not me.”

What else is there to say? He doesn’t know. He can’t think of any other way to articulate how he feels, but there must be _something_ – there _has_ to be something, because this can’t be it, not when his dad is still just watching him in silence, not when he hasn’t managed to explain it all. This _can’t_ be all he can manage.

“It’s not you,” his dad echoes slowly, brow creasing as he sits forward. “I guess… What confuses me – and your mum, and my teammates, probably… Is if it’s your _own_ body, how is it _not_ you?”

For a moment, Owen doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know how to explain it, this feeling that his body is _his_ , but that parts of it are unwanted add-ons. His muscles are his, his eyes are his, and he can look at them in the mirror and accept that. Other things… not so much.

Really, though, he’d still be the same person without any of it.

“I’m… up here,” he gestures to his head, searching for more words that his dad can understand, can relate to. “And… It _is_ my body, but it’s just not how it’s meant to be. It’s like… you know, if you’ve got a wart, maybe, that’s still part of your body, but it’s not… It’s not…”

“It’s not _you_ ,” his dad finishes quietly, and his stare almost seems to intensify as Owen nods, drilling into Owen’s face as if he’s trying to see right through Owen.

Anxiously hopeful, Owen shifts and waits, not daring to interrupt his dad’s thinking right now. This seems like by far the most consideration his dad has put into this, and maybe…

His dad’s eyes close. For a second, Owen’s heart sinks, but he forces himself not to give up. He can’t give up. He has nowhere else to go after this, nowhere else to back down to. If his dad doesn’t accept it, doesn’t hear what he’s trying to say, he’ll press it again. He has to.

“It’s your body,” his dad mutters, scrubbing at his eyes without opening them, “But it’s not… you.”

Holding his breath, Owen twists his fingers together. _Please understand… Please see_ me _._

“I think I get it,” his dad speaks again, and the relief is almost overwhelming, a smile breaking out over Owen’s face before he can stop it, though he tries to bite down on it as his dad’s eyes open. “I think… Yeah, I…”

“Really?” he has to check, as much as he doesn’t want to rock the boat.

“Yeah,” his dad nods. “It’s still… I can’t _relate_ , but I think I understand.”

The beam that widens, splitting Owen’s cheeks, is no longer stoppable, and he has to resort to ducking his head instead, even as warmth unfurls in his chest. His dad understands. Finally, he’s gotten through, found a way out of this ongoing cycle of hurt and hopelessness. His dad _understands_.

And he’s not alone.


End file.
